Bay Area Science Festival

A public forum/seminar (See 'wonder dialogues', we have a hold on the David Brower Center in Berkeley - 180 person capacity - for Nov 1st)

A hand-on carnival-style event with hands-on activities/demos (See 'Discovery Days' - a huge carnival being run at AT&T park on Nov 6th)

A science cafe - an informal discussion with a scientist at a bar/cafe (See the 'science pub crawl' being run on Nov 4th)

We might first explore a public forum event, as we have to act quickly on this if we'd like to keep the date/space. At the last working group meeting there was some ideas about how to make a forum more fun and interactive than a normal lecture format, such as making it into a 'game show'. (Megan Palmer)

Update

June 1st: Teleconference Brainstorming Ideas for the Festival

Teleconference attendees:

Megan Palmer

Connie Lee

Mike Fisher

Danielle Ercek

Jay Vowles

Public Forum Event v1

Please edit below with suggested speakers, topics and formats. Don't worry about changing things on this page - we can always revert to previous versions! Please also LIST YOUR NAME ALONGSIDE CHANGES so it is easy to track changes

option 2: presentation from a dynamic speaker who gives the synthetic biology overview, and then audience members have their choice of sessions to attend (Synthetic Biology and Human Health, Syn-biologically Produced Chemicals, Synthetic Biology vs. Nature, etc.) Each session includes short talks from researchers aimed at a general audience with plenty of room for questions. Audience free to move from session to session. (Mike Fisher)

Format Option 1 v1 (Megan Palmer)

I'm organizing as individual speakers/topics, but this could we have fewer speakers each talking about a subset of these topics (especially for the intro). Please feel free to change topics/ordering etc and suggest speakers who might be appropriate

Speaker/Topic 1: Why do we want to engineer/build with biology?

Speaker/Topic 2: What types of things are we building now? What types of things do we hope to build?

Speaker/Topic 3: How do we go about building/engineering biology? Philosophies and approaches (Top-Down, Bottom-Up)